When people say that the blind have heightened senses, they aren’t wrong. Take bats, for example. They make up for their famously ‘horrendous vision’ through echolocation. But with humans, it’s a little more tricky. Here is what Scientific American has to say “when the brain is deprived of input in one sensory modality, it is capable of reorganizing itself to support and augment other senses, a phenomenon known as cross-modal neuroplasticity”. There is a link to the study but if you failed high school science, here is cross-modal neuroplasticity in a nutshell: your brain adapts to injury/loss by fusing together two or more systems of sense. With this in mind, Orengeva has designed a tactile camera for the blind. It’s essentially a specialized camera that converts its captures into 3D objects that are touchable by its users. 2C3D won the Asia Design Prize of 2018, and even allows users to save three-dimensional objects. Though none of us at Jetplanes & Champagne suffer from vision loss, we can’t help but note this down for our next birthday!